The Veil: Seriously, Blumhouse. That's Enough.

This poster has almost NOTHING to dowith the bulk of the movie. Solid work, BH.

A Revenge Honey "It's Good to Be Back" Review with LinnieThe Veil (2016)
It's my first review back being Revenge Honey after Honey Switch Month, and I have to say, acting as Sci-Fi Honey was a bit weird for me. Mostly, because I was only talking about films I loved and I never got the chance to rage about terrible films, as I so often do when reviewing under my own designation. Thank goodness, shortly before I came back, Blumhouse dumped a bunch of their bottom-of-the-barrel movies on to Netflix weeks before their planned releases (this behavior will henceforth be known as a "Blumhouse Dump"), presenting me with an opportunity to talk about Phil Joanou's The Veil...

A movie that might have been okay in theory, had it not been ruined by typical jump scare, blue-filtered, found-footage, Blumhouse bullshit. And it was. Ruined by it. Totally.The Story: Twenty-five years after a religious cult run by Jim Jacobs (NOT Jim Jones... you hear me? NOT) commits mass suicide, the lone survivor returns to the scene of the crime with a documentary film crew, intent on discovering why she survived. While there, ghosts and shit show up, and the crew finds footage (*snerk*) of the cult, and just what it was they were doing those twenty-five years ago. Spoiler alert! Kool-aid wasn't involved, but sugar cubes were.

Also involved? Beating people to death with a crucifix.

Written by Deputy Travis Junior (google that shit if you don't get the reference), The Veil is an exercise in wasted potential from start to finish. I don't know if the story was muddled straight from script phase, or a certain producer got his grubby hands on it and had to go putting his very specific mark all over the movie. But watching The Veil is also an exercise in frustration, because you can almost see the movie that could have been, had someone bothered to say, "Hey! Maybe we don't need this documentary crew nonsense? Or... do we even need Jessica Alba at all?"

The correct answer is "no." 95% of the time, you don't need Jessica Alba.The other 5% of the time is Sin City.

Thomas Jane stars as "Jim Jacobs" (could you have BEEN any less subtle? Jesus), and the reality is, whether you get Thomas Jane behaving like a normal human being or Thomas Jane chewing scenery, you're in for a damn entertaining time. And in The Veil, you get Thomas Jane chewing scenery like an epileptic woodchuck. He's never less than bizarrely charismatic, and in a movie that is half-populated by a cast that looks like they were dosed with Ambian prior to filming, you are lucky to have him.

It's like Charlie Manson and Johnny Depp had a megalomaniacal baby.

But outside of Jane's overacting, the story about "The Heaven's Veil" cult is actually deeply unsettling, as it pertains to the cult's mythology, and the script's interesting twist involving government intervention is kind of brilliant. But it should have been saved for a film that had higher aspirations than giving Lily Rabe and Jessica Alba another horror film on their IMDb credits. Had the film been cut in half, and the scenes JUST involving the cult been strung together, there could have really been something here. But instead, we are left with the same perplexing pile of bullshit clichés we always get when the House of Blum is involved in a horror movie's production.

So. Much. Darkness.

Maybe one day, some clever YouTuber will manage to edit together the watchable parts of this movie. Until then, just avoid it as you would any random shitty horror film that showed up on Netflix with absolutely no advance warning or marketing.

Revenge Honey Rating: 1 & 1/2 confused Albas out of 5

The Veil is available on Netflix Streaming. Don't pay for it. Seriously.